photo credit: Natalie Osborne

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When Madi Diaz started writing the songs that would eventually become her fourth album, History of a Feeling, she didn’t have a set number to hit. So she kept writing and, eventually, wound up with roughly 100 songs to choose from. The thing is, though, a painful breakup was the impetus for this creative outburst—so the spoils certainly came with a price.  “I wasn’t whistling through that shit,” Diaz says with a laugh. “There are going to be some days where you catch yourself in that flow and the words are right there. Sometimes it takes writing 100 songs to find the right 11 ones.”

History of a Feeling marks a rebirth of sorts for Diaz. She grew up in a musical family in Lancaster, Pa., teaching herself to play guitar by strumming along to tunes by Sheryl Crow and the Dixie Chicks. Her formal training came next, thanks to a stint at the Berklee College of Music in Boston—though she never finished and instead moved to Nashville, and eventually Los Angeles. In LA, she collaborated with anyone and everyone—making connections, as well as releasing Phantom in 2014, an album with an electro[1]pop spring in its step. Eventually, she moved back to Nashville with the desire to get back to her songwriting roots. And, throughout the 11 songs that make up History of a Feeling, Diaz offers a series of sparse, tender folk arrangements, creating an intimacy one might expect from someone pouring their guts out. As the record’s title suggests, Diaz is ready to explore a wide-range of emotions—she wasn’t writing in real-time, per se, but did parse from journals she was keeping during her period of upheaval.

Yet, though the album grew out of a rather grim place, Diaz believes that rawness actually helped her make a creative leap forward. “There’s part of me that’s so excited to communicate the [song] and nothing else matters,” she says. “The challenge is stuck in language—to figure out what the most authentic way to get a recording down to be most reflective of me. You have to be satisfied with looking in the mirror and you can’t spend days trying on clothes. You glance in the mirror and move on.”